World Mission of the Church - Lesson 7

Dr. Timothy Tennent
World Mission of the Church
wm601-07
Acts Chapter 11 (Part 1)
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:01] Okay. What we want to do now is talk about the history of the church's obedience to the Great Commission. One of the things I regret in a way, in terms of the time of the class, is that we're we're not able to deal with the period prior to the modern period. So we leave out the whole discussion of from Pentecost to the modern period. I would encourage you to take history missions or some of the course that would bring this out. But I would like us to talk about the modern period within four general categories, and that's why him number seven is the handout, which will help you to categorize the four phases of the modern period. We're going to begin with what we call beachhead missions and go to frontier missions, unreached peoples missions, and then what I call indigenous initiated missions. Now, in your textbook, Dr. Winter only talks about ERA one, two and three. In this class, you're going to hear one, two, three and four. I'm expanding this, I think updating really. I think what he has done there not to win winner has not talked about a fourth era, but I'm going to be introduced not here to you today. Now, what I want us to do is rather than doing a historical survey, even in the modern period, all we're going to do is tell you what were the key features of this period of time. And then secondly, what what was the one or two key figures that more or less embodied this breakthrough to a new way of thinking about missions? So that's what we're going to do. So you'll be introduced a few key figures and why they are so strategic and important, and there'll be hundreds of people we won't talk about and other kind of events, simply a general kind of breakthrough to understand how missions has changed since 1792 to the present. 

[00:02:00] Basically, what we want to do by doing this, though, we're not at all implying that even the Protestant church was not active in missions prior to William Kerry. One of the problems in the popular mythology of missions that somehow William Carey represents the the beginning of the Protestant movement. I have here, just for your information, just to give you a little visual, look at this, the Moravian who preceded Kerry and who went all over the world with the gospel from the estate of Nicholas von Zenz and Dorf is depicted on this global map. And I have an m at Major places that we have Moravian planting churches around the world, including in India. This is all prior to the Ministry of William Carey. We do have missionaries that are going out, but it is actually on the margins. This is another example, the marginalization thing, the margins. The churches are doing this. The magisterial Reformation was not producing missionaries, and it took William Carey to actually create a breakthrough in the mainstream church. And he gets called the father of modern missions because the people who are in the mainstream write the history books. So we're not actually trying to discount these figures that precede Kerry at all. But Kerry is really important because he does represent a major breakthrough in how emissions is done And the way we are going to be looking at it here is by dividing the four basic areas. This is a general scheme for looking at the modern period, how it's developed from 1792 to the present under these four headings, and they correspond to the four headings found on your over your handout. Number seven. What I do in this is I create a number of dates where the periods begin. 

[00:03:57] Now this would be very careful. I can't remove this to walk up to the thing that you can look and see that era. One, for example, goes from 1792 to 1910. You see the line drawn there. The second era, though, begins in 1865 and goes to 1974. The third begins in 34 and goes to I'm going to say, 2004. I explain why I said that. The fourth begins in 1989 and goes into question mark. We don't know when. Now, the reason we have these periods overlapping is because that's the way history happens. A certain way of doing missions and thinking about missions arises in 1792, and it continues now in 1865. You're having a major new way of thinking by Hudson Taylor. We'll see. But it doesn't change the rest of the mission world. The Western world is still going on that old locomotive, and it takes until 1910 that we really recognize that this new paradigm missions in second era is now dominant in the whole of the missionary world. So we have here a situation where a period begins, gathers steam is dominant, becomes challenged, but again, it continues to carry force until eventually it passes to the next era. So this is reflecting more of the way history actually unfolds rather than having periods of time that just end in the end, which is not accurate. I don't think so. That's why we have these overlapping periods, because it takes a while for a number, second stage to rise and stage one to decline and so forth. But all of these and we'll look at all of these events in next, hopefully. But today we'll finish this. But all of these are meant to connect with each other. That's another reason why we have the overlapping stage. 

[00:05:53] It's like a puzzle that's been put together. When we talk about beachhead missions giving way to frontier missions. It doesn't mean that when Frontier Missions finally emerges, that beachhead missions is no more or it's irrelevant. It's just that it is built upon and it's expanded, and it is superseded in some ways by the new realities. But it's not like that we're said, Oh, what was done before was wrong. It's just a deepening understanding of how we have to extend the mission further. Okay. So that's important because as you go, some people think that when you get to the fourth area, that means unreached peoples is irrelevant or frontier missions are irrelevant. No, all of these are still with you, that you just carry it further in your thing, like building a building you keep building on the previous foundation. It's there. Any questions about the structure of this before we look at each of these one by one and we clear kind of what we're doing, what were our methodologies? Because our purpose is not to do a comprehensive study of history, but just to look at the eras and the key figures that were they embody the breakthrough of each era. Okay, let's begin what we call beachhead missions and explain what we mean by that. This is a period we're arguing lasts from 1792 and goes to 1910. And the key figure is, of course, William Kerry. Now, if we ask ourselves what did the world look like when William Carey contemplated going cross-cultural? William Kerry is born in England in 1761. He is a very, very poor family, right in the middle of a tiny, little impoverished village called Path Prosperity. He has a skin disease which makes it impossible for him to be outside in the sun. 

[00:07:51] Now, think about this. I would call him the India. This is a guy on the margins of the church. He is a dissenter. Later, when he becomes ordained, it's against the law for his own father to come here and preach. Because if you belong to the Church of England, you weren't allowed to attend the meeting of a dissenter in order to really appreciate how marginalized William Kerry is in his day from the ecclesiology. You have to really kind of get into the whole mindset of European Christianity. But he is baptized in 1783 as a Baptist. It's a part of the descending church to this day. And he was reading books like The Voyages of Captain Cook. He was fascinated by the world out there, and he began to reflect on it as a Christian. If you go and think about what the world looked like when William Kerry was poised to go to India, you would be see that the percent of non Western Protestants was only 1% of the entire world of Protestants, which means that 99% of all Protestants were located in the Western world. And that's sinking a little bit. Is it any wonder that people perceived in the 19th century that Christianity was associated with Western culture and white people because 99% were in that category, even by 100 years later, by 1910 and by 1900, it only changed to 10% of global Protestants were non-Western and therefore 90% were Western Christians. And yet today, look at the situation today where 67% of Christians are non-Western, and this puts the Western Protestants in a distinct, not even barely a distinct minority. Now, this is a sea change compared to the world as it looked to the eyes of William Kerry. What we are witnessing in our day is the true globalization of Christianity. 

[00:10:10] This is why I told you when my Indian friends, Hindu friends say to me, why should I accept a white man's religion? I say, What are you talking about? What do you make you think Christian is a white man's religion? Because the typical follower of Christianity is not a male person, and it's certainly not a Western person today. But in Kerry's day, you couldn't say that. And so Kerry is facing a situation where the church simply has not taken seriously the ethnic emphasis. They are having a great time within their own ethnic groups. Things are doing going well. They have their own fights and various things, trying to move things ahead. But the church is simply not seriously addressing the cross-cultural aspect of the church church's life. Eventually we're moving ahead here, but eventually in 1792. And that is the point where I start the first era of modern missions. He publishes a book called An Inquiry. Now I have here a copy of it, an actual facsimile of the original. I think I have actually a I can show you on the overhead here what it looks like today. It's called an inquiry. But listen to the full title is an inquiry into the obligations of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathens in which the religious state of the different nations of the world. The success of firm undertakings and the practicability of further undertakings are considered. Now that is a 19th century book. This would not shoot to the top of Amazon.com because we like these little pithy titles. And that's why I was I was really amazed when my book, I didn't choose a ton of my book. I had a nice little pithy two word title for my book, and the publishers changed it to, I think, a 19th century title, Christianity at the Religious Roundtable, Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam. 

[00:12:12] Oh, boy. How do you tell somebody, Go get that book? It's like the 19th century. But maybe, Carrie, I can live with it because Carrie had it. But this is in our library, actually has the original facsimile of what it actually look like. If you were to buy this book and say, 92, is this so much better than the modern publications of it? And you really get a feel of like stepping back in time when you when you look at this book. Now, what is so significant about the book? And there's another that's actually a you know, I forgot to put this on there. I scanned it and you see the the front cover there on the overhead quotes. Amazingly, quotes are text looked at in Paul in Romans, the great chain of command from the Lord. Notice how the S's or those like F type you know it's this is great. You love it and they even have you can't see it. I don't if I have an actually I do have it here I never had this is all through the book. Every page of the book this is page one of the book will have at the end of the page a hanging word down here that this is a little historical tidbit about 19th century publications. And this was done, by the way, all over India as well. It's really fascinating. The reason it's done is clear out in a minute. But every page has the first word of the preceding page hanging down here. It was commonly done in 19th century. Why? What's that? No, it's actually not for the printer. It's for the buyer. Why would someone who own this book be happy to have, like today's books we don't have? When you read a book, you don't have the preceding word. 

[00:13:56] Next page on the bottom, Why they do this? That's exactly right. You win the star for the day they read this book was read out loud to people in India. All the publication 19th Century were done this way because most people can time this text through hearing it been read. They were illiterate. They couldn't read. So I got someone literate to read it to them. So when you look at a publication in the US, if someone says, I published 3000 copies of my book or 5000 copies and they're sold out, you probably it's you. Maybe you have 5000 readers at best. For some people I know not you, but buy books for them or read them. You know you want to have it on your. And I had a friend that got it when I was at Gordon Karnow who who asked, actually inquired if he could buy not Bart's dog Maddox, but just the orange covers because he went to wrap it around a cardboard and have it on his shelf because that just looks so impressive. But he didn't actually want to read the dog Maddox. I know you would never do that. Every book you have, you've read. But in the 19th century, if you had a thousand copies of a book, you might be heard by 10,000 people. Because they read it and they read and they passed it on. And with all this. So this book had a lot of impact. Anyway, what I want to do is actually take a moment to analyze the structure of the book of this little 87 page tract, because this has been called the Magna Carta of Christian Missions in the modern period. It is the kind of defining statement that got the modern period going. 

[00:15:41] And I think the reason it did is not just because Kerry was willing to go to India. I think that that is obviously a huge part of the story. But more importantly, Kerry saw the whole thing from the theological biblical basis. He saw this as simply a matter of obedience. We are not taking seriously the text of scripture, and this document is highly informed by theological liberal considerations. And if you look at the five parts of this document, which we'll look at in a moment. You will see that essentially the whole of mission studies to this day is still operates, including this class within the parameters of these five parts of his book. So I want to show it to you. The first part is you see here is what we call chapter one. He calls it section one. Whether the commission given by our Lord is still binding on us. And this is where Kerry starts out, as we did in the class, by addressing biblical theological problems in his day. He was facing a hyper Calvinism, which said, because God elects people, we don't have to do anything. It was this crazy idea that somehow God's sovereignty should inspire church passivity. God's sovereignty does not inspire passivity. It's to inspire certainty of the outcome and the excitement of being a part of what a sovereign God is doing in the world. But he was in a situation where people said to him point blank, as he suggested at one point he was at a pastors meeting and he suggested, Is the Great Commission still binding on us? And someone said to him, If God intended the heathen to hear the gospel, he'll do it without your help or mine. Now, that is not good theology. 

[00:17:39] God has the sovereign right to reveal himself in a vision to every single person on earth. If we're talking about God's sovereign power, that's not the issue here. The point is, God has chosen in his sovereignty to include the church on fulfilling his mission in the world. So he addresses in this account a number of theological issues, including issues related to the actual text of Scripture and how the going and baptizing and teaching are all the. He didn't actually describe the participle structure of it, but he does point out how the church is still baptizing. They're still teaching. Why are we not going? He brings out a number of points in his day. They all believe that the Great Commission had already been fulfilled by the original Disciples original apostles. He points out that this is simply not true, and he points out that Why would Jesus said, I'm with you always, even into the age? So he addresses a number of theological problems that were present, and we have to do the same thing as pastors and teachers in the church. We have to address the theological problems that we encounter in our churches. This is the basis of the problem. Secondly, he enters into an historical section, which what we're doing now in the class, while he examines what has been done up to this time. Here's Section two. Concerning a short review of former undertakings for the conversion of the heathen. Now, this is where he engages in essentially mission history or church history, where he talks about what has been done up to that point. So he looks at the Moravian work. He talks about from actually sort of the book of Acts. And he goes all the way through to the present, what has been done to globalize the Christian faith? And he highlights various things that's happened. 

[00:19:35] So the importance of church history and mission history in mission studies is very clearly laid out here. The third section. Is what I would call anthropological in the sense that he does empirical data research like what we've seen and the work of Todd Johnson and others that we've been highlighting the last several days. And I think you find most profoundly in your operation world, this is the first operational world really ever published. He essentially is going through all the countries of the world and talk. What do we find there? How many Christians are there? What's there are some of this is highly inaccurate. We now know looking back, some of it is amazingly accurate. He has chart after chart of a chart like this. This book is full of charts. Dozens of them like this, where he lays out the length and breadth of the Congo of Angola and he talks about the number of people who live there and what their religion is. This is unbelievable. Again, it underlies that missions has always been served well when we have good data. Where are the in which people groups? If you have this assumption, well, everybody has heard the gospel and we don't need to be bothered by it. Then you have to counter with the facts and say, well, look, we actually can show you we have only 0.01% Christians in this particular people group. We have to make a response to that. You can't just live in ignorance. And so he he actually marshals a lot of data based on in those days they had mainly just travelogs of early explorers, Captain Cook and others who made estimates about how many people lived in various parts of these regions. And this was the first attempt to bring together data. 

[00:21:31] And that would, of course, be changed dramatically over the years. But it does give us a feel for it. Here's one of his charts on Asia. And he has Turkey, Arabia, Arabia, Persia, great territory, Siberia. All these places include China, which he claims has 60 million people even in his day. An amazing, dramatic, remarkable kind of work that he does here in this book. Fourthly, he addresses, as we have to as well, practical issues. This is Section four. He calls this the practicability of something being done more than what is done for the conversion of the hate. He then he addresses a number of practical issues in why people do not go, and he addresses issues which you actually find laughable in a way, reading it based on what you know about the world. But it's amazing the things that he was asked by church people when he suggested missions. There are people who said to him, number one, they would say it's impossible for a European to learn an Asian language. It can't be done. Europeans can learn other European languages. So a person who learned, who grew up speaking English might can learn French or German or whatever, but a European could not possibly learn to speak Korean. Now, my experience with Korean is that's probably true. It is a bit daunting if you grow up speaking English and someone throws a Chinese text in front of you. You do feel there's a gulf there that you don't quite have by looking at a German text or Spanish text? So it was widely believed that Westerners just couldn't learn Asian languages. Therefore, we just can't do it. This is must be put in God's sovereign hands. We can't do this. Another widely held belief, which you'll laugh at, I'm sure as well, is the belief about food. 

[00:23:35] They did not believe that a European could live and sustain himself or herself on Asian food. Now most of you probably are going for the weekend is out. Eat Chinese food, Indian food and no telling what kind of food you may eat. But it was believed in 1792 that it was impossible. So they would say that, well, how in the world could you carry enough provisions to feed yourself in India? And he said, Well, I'm going to adapt and eat their food so that can be done. You can't do that. I mean, this is how ignorant people were about the world. And you'll find similar things which are shocking to you that people today believe about travel and so forth. So he addressed these practical issues. It's very, very interesting to read the kind of things he addresses. And we have our own practical problems, you know, visa issues and all kinds of issues that we have to address. Obviously, since the Reformation broke out in the heart of Germany, people wondered if you in the heart of Europe, how do you get to a place like China or India? The Catholics, of course, were seafaring countries in the south, Spain, Portugal. They had already sent ships all over the world. But it was a little harder for Protestant countries to think about the logistics of getting somebody to India. We think today about, you know, traveling to India or anywhere is fairly easy because of air travel. But you can imagine how this represented a huge problem for people in in that time period. So we all face all kinds of mystical issues, have to face safety, travel, living, housing, all of these things. And Carrie addresses that very practical funding, how it's funded. 

[00:25:19] All of this is carefully laid out in this book. Finally what I call kind of inspiration. The anointed side of this, where you realize even if you answer everybody's questions theologically, even if you explain all the practical ways, it will work out and show them the history of the whole thing. When it comes right down to it, people need to be open to the call, the Holy Spirit, and to be challenged to take seriously the Word of God for their lives in their response to the Christian message. And that's that passion comes through, carries writing. And in fact, the whole document ends this way. This is the page 87 of the dark document. Halfway down, he says it is true all the reward is a measure of grace. Now, he's a reformed Baptist. He's deeply committed. You won't find anybody more committed to the sovereignty of God and William Kerry. And yet he did not see that in any way as giving him a ticket to sit on the sidelines for actually going to India. So, of course, his mere grace was nevertheless encouraging. What a treasure, what a harvest must await such characters as Paul and Eliot and Brainard. Interestingly, the three where he mentions other than the Apostle Paul, the two others are from right here in Massachusetts. Great missionary bankers who preach the gospel to Native Americans in the in the New world and others have given themselves wholly to the work of the Lord. What a heaven will it be to see the many myriads of poor heathens of Britons amongst the rest, who by their labors have brought to the knowledge of God. Surely a kind of rejoicing like this is worth aspiring to. Surely it is worthwhile to lay ourselves out with all our might in promoting the cause and Kingdom of Christ. 

[00:27:16] So this document was comparable to Karl Bart's publication of his comments on Romans. And this was the bombshell dropped down on the playground of the theologians and the church, I should say. This is the great dramatic challenge to the church to go back to Scripture, to search it out and to see if we have not missed something major and our responsibility to the people of God, and is for this reason largely that Kerry is called the father of modern missions. It's actually not because he was the first missionary or any of that, but it's because he started a missionary movement. He was the impetus for the founding of multiple mission societies, which eventually lead the entire Protestant effort around the world. Here's a picture of William Kerry, a well-known picture of Kerry. With him, one of the early translators who taught him. His name is Christian Paul, who became a believer in the year 1801. He got there in 1793. So he had eight years before he had a first person come to Christ. Kerry spent most of his time because he had the skin disease. He wasn't able to be outside much. So he devoted himself to what has really become the hallmark of Protestant missions, and that is the emphasis on the word of God and the translate ability of the Christian message. So Kerry established upfront the precedent, as had happened before him, with people like Zik and Borg, and put Shah, who had been into been to India and trained the Bible into languages in the South. He put the Bible into Bengali and he works in other major languages Sanskrit, Hindi, Assamese, a lot of Indian languages. He put the entire Bible and he actually completed the Bible in six completely different languages. 

[00:29:17] The New Testament into in four major portions of 27 other languages. So he can still be one of the great linguist. It's ever gone out in missionary service and established a great precedent for missionary work. He's so honored today in India that he has his own stamp. This is the ₹6 stamp and it shows Kerry there sitting down. And behind him is Saddam. Poor college. This is another one of his first. He established the first Christian college in all of Asia. He established a college that received people not based on their caste, their duty, but rather on their qualifications. So he had people from all caste who came into this college, which was very controversial. This would be the equivalent in our own history of having a segregated school in the in the fifties. This was a huge, huge, momentous event when Kerry opened its doors to all caste. You have conceivably a Brahmin, high caste Brahmin sitting next to an untouchable if they wanted to learn Sanskrit, to learn and learn. It was not even allowed in most of Indian history for a non Brahmins even learn Sanskrit, and so only the high caste Brahmins could learn Sanskrit, which is the language of their scriptures. Kerry became a lecturer in Sanskrit. The stamp has the word patriot there, which is the word for India in their language in Hindi. And then has here interestingly. William Carey because they don't have really a war, so they have William Carey is, as he was called in India, so remarkable person. He is considered today to be the father of prose Bengali because in his day and this happened all over the world, the language written language was held by an elite group of people. In this case, it was the high caste Brahmins. 

[00:31:28] So by unleashing the language and placing the Bible into the common vernacular in written form, Carey amazingly unleashed the whole possibility of prose. Bengali And you have the explosion of periodicals and newspapers and all kinds of documents that ordinary people are writing in Bengali. So this was a huge cultural stimulus to this day. The the oldest national newspaper in India, The Times of India, it's a paper that you would get in any newsstand in India today. It was founded by William Carey. One of the heroes, an Indian botanist is, amazingly, William Carey. Many of the botanist in India don't even realize he was a missionary. They have studied his books and writings because he classified more flora and more botanical classifications than anybody ever done in the history of India. This man was a truly Christian thinker in terms of power, bringing the gospel to bear on everything that he did. Perry lost his support from back home. He went out under the Baptist Missionary Society, and so he was for the vast majority of his time, it was a what we call today a tent maker. He's self-supporting. He at one point oversaw a dye factory and later on he was a lecturer in Sanskrit in Calcutta, and he would travel from seven poor down to Calcutta every week to lecture. A remarkable guy. He had developed a concept early on of a teen ministry. It's called the Sérum Pour Trio, where William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward were there working together as a team. And one did the printing press and one was doing the preaching and he was doing the translation work. They developed effective team ministry, which is very popular today. All of this is found in seed form in William Kerry, remarkable individual, very inspiring life. 

[00:33:28] And I never forget when I first went to visit Kerry's grave. I don't know about you, but I love going to grave sites. I have been to more dead people's heads, more dead than you imagine. Baseball figures, political figures, you know, you name it, I've been there. So I, of course, had to go see William Kerry's grave. And he never had the experience of modern things like furlough and all that. So when he went to India in 1792, he never came back. 41 years in India. Which was making another point because everyone said, Oh, you'll die of any diseases and you won't last three months over there when you get there. 41 years he lived in India and he died in India. Never came back home. He was buried there in September. So here's a man who has all his accomplishments the father, the missionary movement, translator of the Bible and six Indian languages. Founded the first Christian College in Asia. On and on and on his accomplishments. Before he died, he wrote on a piece of paper what he wanted written on his tombstone. And so I got to his grave and I had not remembered what would be on there as I was taken back because I saw what he has on his grave. This is the only thing written on William Curry's grave, says This has William Curry has his dates in it has underneath it a poor, helpless worm. Am I on thy kind arms? I fall. Now that that is the sign of a great man who understands, after all of his labors and work and endeavors for the Lord and writing and translating that the end of the day, he's a saved, redeemed sinner like everybody else. That's the way you would express that 19th century. 

[00:35:24] We wouldn't use that language today calling ourselves worms. People get all upset at you by the 19th century. That was the way you said that I must become less. He must become greater. It's the way you would say. I acknowledge that this is God's work. It's the mercy of day. In fact, his great sermon that's often misquoted over and over again, and people's rendition of it when he preached his sermon, which called him to fail the Mission Society. His phrase he kept saying is often quoted as attempt great things for God. Expect great things from God. You actually see it in print at times. But what he actually said was not first attempt, then expect. But expect then attempt expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. And we think he originally actually just said it as expect great things attempt great things. It showed that William Kerry understood that your first priority is the expectation of God's movement. And then our attempts to do things. It actually places the whole of William Kerry's mission in the context of the mission day before you attempt great things for God, you first expect great things from God. You expect God to do his work. And then in his graciousness, he allows us to participate in it, and therefore we can attempt great things. I don't think anyone could find and carry. A person who lacked an appreciation for either the biblical data or the overall context that God is calling his people carry believe an election as much as anybody. But he saw it as being extended to God's sovereignty in the life and work of the obedient church. Okay. Our thoughts are comments on William Kerry before we look at some of the ways this has been largely summarized in our four stages of mission comments or questions about William Kerry. 

[00:37:33] Okay, Why do we call this speech admissions? Well, we call it beachhead missions because Kerry and Adam Judson, who followed him, who you were reading about, their emphasis was on planting the church in a new country. There is nothing in Kerry that really brings out the whole people group emphasis that we've talked so much. Kerry is just really happy to be in India now by virtue of his translation work. It really he obviously is is connecting to various people groups. But the language of missions in 19th century is largely about going to places where there are no Christians and planning the church in a brand new country. So Kerry goes to India when Adam Judson goes, as you're reading about in your textbook, Judson goes to Kerry first. Because he wants to submit his ministry to the great. At that point, well known father of modern missions. But Judson goes on to Myanmar, goes on to Burma. So Judson, I think, is the mentality. I don't want to work in India. Kerry's already there. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and go over next door. Go down the road a little bit. Of course, India in those days included what's now Bangladesh and Pakistan. So he goes all the way to Burma. You find their ministry primarily on the coast lands. That's very typical of this period until we see some important breakthroughs. This is mainly for pragmatic reasons, and that is because of the number one reason that missionaries died in the whole of the 19th century. What was it? Right. And what particular disease? Malaria. Malaria in the 19th century was the most deadly. Most. Most likely reason you would end up in a box. In Africa. The average lifespan of a missionary was only two years. 

[00:39:36] So this was a very powerful consideration. In fact, you think about the hundreds and thousands of young people your age who went to Africa, 1900, knowing when they went the average lifespan of mission in Africa was two years. That's what's called the white man's graveyard. You know, they went away when they packed their belongings in their casket when they went. That's pretty amazing. When I was in Nigeria, I used to visit the missionary graveyards. You look at the number of people who buried their wives and husbands and children in these graveyards. You have to stroll through that a few times before you begin to criticize 19th century missionaries. They gave everything for this cause with all of their mistakes and ethnic centricity. They were committed to the task in a way that I think we have to take it take notice of. So because of this problem, parents, mainly of young people, stormed the gates of the mission boards, these new societies, and said, You're not going to take my son to India. I'm sorry. You have to have policies to protect their health. So most mission boards early on adopted very strict policies that prohibited anyone from going into interior areas on their mission, because malaria is not nearly a problem of us on the coast, as is in interior areas. So most of the missions stayed fairly clustered along the coast later on. There are political reasons because most of the Western countries had political port treaty rights with countries that allowed them to have essentially colonies on the coast lands in the in the port cities like the British East India Company and other places, people like that, They weren't able to, you know, come back and report often. And so these are long term resident missionaries. 

[00:41:33] There's no air flight, obviously no such thing as short term missions. None of that is possible or even thinkable in those days. So these are the three main things that characterize 19th century missions in the beachhead model. The reason the word beachhead is used is the word beachhead comes from a military expression that may not be as familiar to our generation, but a beachhead refers to a state the first place you establish a stronghold when you invade, you know, a new land. So the whole Normandy invasion or the Norman invasion, well, that too. But the when that well, D-Day, when they went to the beaches of Normandy, they actually came and they that was a beachhead literally on the coast of France in order to then go in and to defeat Hitler and the interior parts of Europe. So that metaphor has come over into mission language and the sense that when you first go into a country, you first establish a beachhead and then you're able to go in interior, you find a Senator, David Livingstone, who spends most of his time trying to find the source of the Nile River, trying to find ways that a mission board that was on the coast could go into Interior Africa successfully. It's all about this kind of mentality, about geography and how we're going to get into interior parts of the country. And for that, for many, many years, missions was largely stuck along the coastlines of various countries. So a country emphasis, coastline, interest and emphasis. Long term missionaries, no short term in those days. And clearly this is done by Europeans. The Americans do get in on this, of course, as you know, from HUD, from Adam Judson. But the Europeans are the leaders in this whole first phase, and they're the ones that are actually inspiring the Americans to not be left behind. 

[00:43:32] And, you know, from reading the biography of Judson, Judson is deeply inspired by the fact that Kerry and others are already there. And why aren't we doing anything? So the Europeans are at this point leading the Americans effectively out into the field. So that's why we call it beachhead missions. And so 1792, that date is associated with the publication of William Kerry's inquiry. That's why that date is established. Okay. Questions or comments about beachhead missions. Kerry did those who were exposed to malaria and survived. It did have I mean, there's this day, even today, 21st century, there's no there's nothing you can take to prevent getting malaria in your blood. I have malaria all in my blood. And so I can't give blood anymore. And I have certain health issues because of that. Every Indian I know has malaria in their blood. This is part of even today as part of the cost of working in malaria infested areas. The difference today is that we have medication that prevents you from getting sick and feverish and dying because of it. But there's still, to this day, no prevention of malaria. So the missionaries were able to adapt to it and survive it and learn to live normal lives with it. But it's not until 1865 that you have the development of malaria medication, which we're still basically using today, variations of it which keep you from dying of it. It's all they have. No because they had developed they it is people develop certain ways of they would have what we would have with the medication. They would also get it in their blood and they would get sick and fevers, but not dying. They would not have that level as much. You still have I mean, this day you have one of the number one cause of death in Africa is malaria, AIDS and malaria, that number 2 to 1 killers today. 

[00:45:30] So it's still a huge cause of death in India and Africa. But it is true that a European has never been exposed to malaria is more likely to die from it than an African or an Asian. That's true, but it's still a very deadly disease. And the reasons one of the challenges is that medicine today is pushed by marketing. So because there's no market in the Western world for malaria, you're really curing malaria. It's much easier to to work on something that takes wrinkles out of your eye, out of the corners of your eyes. We haven't actually really had the research on malaria that that's needed in the Western world, though that's changing. There are currently a number of really, really exciting possibilities that are right now being worked on to to cure malaria and to provide medication that will prevent you from getting it, but it's not currently available. Okay. Other comments of comments about Carrier you just mentioned early. Early on, I thought it was a newborn. Well, it wasn't uncommon, but the it was uncommon. But I'm saying this this whole thing happens at the ascendency of all of that. So all of this is simultaneous event. So the East India company involvement in India does precede the obviously the port of inquiry. But there's so few British merchants that are working in India and they most were not learning the language and they might learn a few like trade words, but there was no serious linguistic work being done on a wide enough scale. But even as early as 1605, Robert Ginobili had gone to India, lived in trunk of bar and had learned San is the first European learned Sanskrit. So even in the 17th century, even proving that a European could learn Sanskrit. 

[00:47:30] But it was not popularly believed. That it could be done by ordinary people. It was just not thought of. So more the problem is perception than just empirical data on that point. Other thoughts or comments. Okay. See a break and we'll come back and we'll pick up. I'm actually going to pass over Judson because you've already your expert on Judson. Should be soon. And we'll try to go on to the next era to show the next big breakthrough. I'm not reading the Justin book, though. When he came to India. India Company didn't want him there. They wanted him to leave. That's right. Same with Kerry. That's like Kerry's and Sam. Poor Zachary actually was kicked off. The British boat, arrives in India on a Dutch ship, and sample was a Dutch colony. And so British controlled Calcutta, but they didn't put in control. So that's why he was up 40 kilometers north and Sambhar. So, no, the British did not want Kerry or any of them there. We talked about how it was common for, you know, in a colony, the Lutheran idea of whoever controls a certain area, their religion. You know, if it's if it's a Lutheran country, then. Right. Right. It's Catholic. But they didn't have that idea. Going to the. Going to India like they didn't want to propagate Christianity at all. The traders were there to make money and they they viewed that any interruption Hinduism would cause riots, which it did. The Indians would riot when anyone would try to to change their religion from Hinduism. So the traders didn't want that all this disrupt their trade. They're there to make money. They had no interest in the gospel. It wasn't till after Wilberforce that you begin to find. 

[00:49:17] Talk about using the Indian holdings in a way that could maybe create a Christian India. But the traders were not insane at all. They're there for money. Justin The Justin book is kind of like running from these mares, and I know, you know, all these different books are boats and trying to get passes and permission to go to one place or the other. I know. And of course he's there during a war period. So it's a difficult time. And then he's American and there's American, but they think he's British. So that I don't think he's but a slave. If they fear he must be part of the he must be a spy and all that. All right. All right. Yeah. You're just back we're talking about. They would all like ax in the model and stuff. Acts is pretty much like historical narrative, right, as a genre. And so but we take something. We always take it to be prescriptive of like, here's how you should do your chore or you don't do the whole process. And I don't know, how do you square it, just kind of it being more historical, right? Maybe just telling more how they did it instead of telling us how we should do it. Right. I think that's a good point. It's not always clear. We do know from saying, Timothy, that all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, improve training and righteousness. So we we can we can say for sure that it is certainly descriptive of what happens. The question is and what why is that prescriptive for how we should do it? And then when it comes to such a thing like church government and all that, how has that culture determinative that may be possible? We can just see what Paul did in his particular cultural context. 

[00:50:49] Maybe another church may be governed slightly differently or whatever, so it is not always clear. But I think that the because the Great Commission passed it, I think that the basic general plan of how the church always pressed to new ethnic groups is definitely prescriptive. How that's done, whether, for example, targeting urban areas is the best way to do it first and all that, I think I don't necessarily think that would be drawn from the text pragmatically or might be what was best for that particular people. Groups. Yeah, and for us it might be like, you know, the principles we get may practically be the best things. Yeah, it's a good point. It's not always easy. I mean, you can always overly prescribe things to the point where, you know, you can only do things the way the scripture does. And as you know, in the Reformation, big debate about whether or not we should do things only with Scripture because you're mandated or only not do things that they prohibit. You know, what point do you say, Well, as long as we don't prohibit it, we're free to do it, as opposed to saying we're only and do what they you know, what they specifically mandate. So I'm sure a lot of discussion on this, I guess seminal works on I think the best best discussion on this is actually with discussion related to the role of social sciences and mission. And the whole debate was done on the Gavron responses of McGovern's work, which we'll look at maybe tonight. At the time we will discuss this in class. Yeah. So that's my yeah, you are the name of stuff. Okay. Yeah.